heating up

[Ivo Skoric]

Just a few observations from the election year America:
1) it is interesting to watch. people from democratic campaign 
stealing classified documents from the national archives to protect 
their former boss. that's really a highlight of how is the ethics 
perceived on both sides of the fence of the upcoming choice between a 
man that can't make up his mind, and a man that have his mind made up 
by the Carlyle group.
2) shelves in the bookstores are bending under the weight of hefty 
tomes written in a last couple of years about the Bush regime. 
fortunately for him, his subjects, kind of like him, do not read 
books. otherwise, he would not only lose elections, but probably go 
to prison, and maybe, just maybe, walk the last mile. the open-ness 
with which he is bashed in this books has a quality still lacking in 
many eastern european societies. there, the social will is still 
controled by reducing the input of information. here, it is quite the 
opposite: anything goes, and it is impossible to say what is real, 
gasping for truth while carried in the vicious torrent of released 
information.
3) recent changes in campaign law, opened a possibility for the very 
partisan non-partisan groups to operate. this evokes memories of 
Serbia in 2002 when the Otpor! youth movement got people to unseat 
Milosevic. the copy-cat movement sponsored by rich pro-Democrat 
leaning individuals (like Soros) in the US hopes to do the same here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/24/politics/campaign/24ground.html?th
4) on the streets of New York I was already stopped four times by 
young lads with writing pads asking me the same question: "Will you 
help defeat George Bush?" Of course, like everybody else who stops 
you on the street in NYC, they were looking for money. as an 
immigrant I do have a dilemma: as I cannot vote, why would I support 
either candidate? true, Ashcroftian State made this country less 
appealing to immigrants, but the abject 1996 anti-immigrant laws were 
signed in by the Democratic president.
5) The problem with the US is that the "white wine and cheese" urban 
professionals - that those of us, who came of age during the 80s, 
call Yuppies - here are called 'liberal left', while in fact they are 
all conservative Thatcherites by the European standards. So the 
ketchup president may be no more friendly to immigrants than the 
blood for oil president. The real leftists and the real liberals are 
quickly dismissed as anarchists and troublemakers. And the ruling 
party has no option but to be on the right of the Thatcher mark. In 
Europe that space is reserved for specialized fringe parties with 
names like National Front, and with ideology bordering dangerously on 
Nazism. In the US, that's mainstream politics of a ruling political 
party...

ivo